“I guess they noticed the convoy, we have company,” Mia said, raising her voice as she’d learned to do in the Raid. Her senses weren’t worth much if she couldn’t convey her warnings to others. “One of those ‘Elites’ too, a Level 12 one with a pack of nearly thirty Level 10s. Elites, is that what we’re calling Ex-Guardians now?”

  “Its a close translation of the term we used back home,” Nikki noted, and the others just shrugged. It was certainly less of a mouthful than ‘ex-guardian’, and that could save lives when she had to shout the word as a warning later on.

  The soldiers within earshot grew tense, shouldering rifles and quickly checking their gear. Magazines, helmets, straps, grenades, and combat knives. Mia felt magic emanating from more than a few of them, with every last ammo mag radiating Fire mana. Well, she supposed exploding or incendiary bullets would work pretty well against murderous plantlife. A handful of grenades even had some advanced elemental magic sticking to them, and just brushing her mental fingers across the mana within made Mia uncomfortable. It tasted of rot and decay.

  “Is there a decay or rot element?” Mia asked suddenly, getting some looks, but ignoring them in favour of glancing at Nikki expectantly.

  “Rot and Decay both exist as Elements,” the girl said without missing a beat. “Both derivatives of the Darkness, Life and Nature Elements. As in, you can get either with the proper Aspect from any of those three.”

  Great. So the soldiers were packing grenades enhanced with magical Rot or Decay. On the one hand, the magic was icky as hell, but on the other, it would be used on disgusting monsters.

  At first, Mia was worried the elements disturbed her because they used miasma or something, and she promptly started to get worried about people turning into monsters if they somehow managed to make use of miasma instead of mana. Was that how it worked? She wasn’t sure, but that didn’t help her at all. Fear of the unknown, and all that.

  Only once she dared to examine the mana in a bit more detail did she notice that it didn’t generate the same, innate disgust right in her Spirit Sense like miasma did. No, it was an emotional response. An instinctive one.

  They are a perversion of nature. Mia found herself thinking, then froze, suppressing the urge to curse. Right, having alien instincts was not a problem solely reserved for Carmilla. She’d almost forgotten how she’d almost assaulted a soldier just because he stepped on an innocent little pine sapling. But rot and decay are just natural parts of the cycle of life, aren’t they?

  Well, either there was something else wrong with those elements or her Fae instincts just straight up disagreed with her on that matter. Maybe Nature in its purest form was meant to be a jungle of infinite abundance and life where nothing ever died.

  Mia shook her head and refocused; she had monsters to kill. Even if their Levels didn’t feel anywhere near as impressive as they would have been a week or two ago. She could try researching advanced elements later, if she even remembered to after the fighting here was done.

  “They are just waiting,” Mia mused, getting a sense of the miasmic presences. They were stationary, almost dormant. “We should have time for a round of Wards, gather up!”

  Lesser Ward of Protection might not have been her most powerful spell, and it might pale in comparison to a proper Mage Armour, but it might just be the greatest power multiplier in her arsenal. It gave everyone she applied it to a safety net, which could be invaluable. She did remember hearing somewhere that the first combat engagements were the most dangerous for new recruits in an army. Wards could help mitigate that danger a bit.

  It was routine by then, so nobody batted an eye as they made sure they had all their gear on while they lined up. Brent even got one of the local soldiers to give him a sitrep while waiting, to which Mia, of course, listened in, and the conversation swiftly confirmed what Zeigler and the driver had told her previously. It wasn’t killing the monsters loitering about on the other side of the makeshift barricade that was the problem; it was keeping any ground they claimed when enemy reinforcements came down on them like the wrath of some monster god. They didn’t have anyone who could kill the Elite while it was supported by its pack of minions; the best they’d managed was chasing it away.

  But then it just attacked another chokepoint and claimed twice the ground there that its retreat gave the soldiers elsewhere.

  Killing it and any replacements that come should give them enough breathing room to advance.

  The only possible way Mia could see this going wrong was if the monster slipped away to be a menace to a group of soldiers who didn’t have her and her friends around to help them. Or if the beastkin were lying in ambush under some magical shroud even her senses couldn’t pick up.

  She sent Sparkle out to scout around first, asking him to look for any beastkin lying in wait or any sharpshooters setting up to take potshots at them. Magic or not, Mia couldn’t expect most of her group to survive a hypersonic sniper bullet to the head. Especially if it had magic to augment it to be even more deadly than the one that nearly ended her life.

  Mia recognised being sniped from beyond her Spirit Sense’s range as one of her biggest weaknesses. If she didn’t sense an attack coming, even Wisp Form or her shiny new Spirit Blink Subskill wouldn’t be able to save her.

  ‘Nothing?’ Mia asked tensely.

  ‘Nope. Not a thing.’ Sparkle said, having done a full circuit around the neighbourhood, taking a peek onto every rooftop and into every room with an open window facing Mia. ‘Not a single beastkin in sight.’

  ‘Alright then.’ Mia said, relaxing her stance slightly. ‘Head on over to the Elite monster then. I think ambushing our would-be ambusher should be a good way to set the pace of this battle.’

  With how good some beastkins’ hearing was, Mia hadn’t dared speak up about the possibly dormant Elite lying in wait, fearing giving away her advantage. Her team was good enough to react to a Level 12 monster ambush even with a few seconds of warning. Not that she was going to allow it to get to that point.

  ‘Nice.’ Sparkle said happily, speeding up his flight and turning into a pink bolt of energy as he raced across the sky. He came up onto the building, then phased through the ceiling and five floors until he reached the storage room, where the monsters had taken up position. ‘Oh! That’s one freaky beastie. Can I do the honours?’

  The ‘freaky beastie’ was probably referring to the Elite. Its body was that of a lanky, furless gorilla with leathery green skin, but the freaky part was its head. It had a human-enough base shape, but the only features on its ‘face’ were four beady black eyes: one large eye on the left side and three smaller ones on the right.

  ‘Go ahead.’ Mia said, then watched through Sparkle’s eyes as he transformed from his eldritch-Tinkerbell form into that of a feline arcane construct. Claws as long as Mia’s forearm grew on his hand, edges sharp and tinged with the Chaos aspect, while his body grew to the size of a lynx.

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  The Elite sensed him, its body flexing as it stirred just when Sparkle was half the way towards it. One of its long arms swung out blindly, powerful muscles shifting visibly under its skin, but the Sprite easily twisted around the simple attack, and then he was inside the monster’s guard.

  Claws flashed out with savage glee while a magic cackle echoed in Mia’s head, and then the monster’s head rolled free of its shoulders, its torso ravaged with such … enthusiasm, that it looked more like a pile of compost than the once unnerving Elite monster.

  ‘A bit wasteful but so worth it.’ Sparkle said dreamily. ‘I think I should leave the rest to you, I’m getting low on mana, so I’m gonna go back and recharge.’

  Saying so, he used their Bond like a rubber band to send himself zipping over to her, and then he was back to treating her Core like his personal jacuzzi, like usual.

  Mia stood still for a few seconds, trying to compute what’d just happened with more or less success. That had been an Elite monster, a Rank 1 Guardian once upon a time, a fearsome monster that would have once taken her entire team working together to kill, and even then, they would have been one major mistake away from death.

  And Sparkle killed it in a second. Mia thought a bit numbly, then shook her head and refocused. She’d seen stranger stuff. She’d need to get used to how the dangerous things posed to her, or what she posed to things, wasn’t as static as it used to be in The Before. Things became much more dynamic as the System intruded into reality.

  “Sparkle just found and killed an Elite monster,” Mia called out, causing those around her to freeze just like she had. She wondered what types of faces they would have seen if they’d been able to witness the act firsthand as she had. “Not sure whether it was the one causing trouble, but it also had a pack of about thirty Level 10 monster minions, which are a bit angry at the moment.”

  “Big fucker with long arms and freaky unsymmetric four eyes?” A soldier called out.

  “Yep, that’s the one.” Mia nodded, suppressing a grimace as the man spat to the side.

  “Good riddance,” he said with a growl. “That bastard tore apart five of my boys and girls. Come on, you lot! WAVE INCOMING!”

  I suppose that makes him the commanding officer of this detachment. Mia mused, but she and her group all fell in along with the soldiers across the barricade. Just in time, too, because the monster pack broke out onto the street a moment later. They came out wherever they could, leaping off balconies, through doors, jumping through windows, be they on the ground or first floor.

  Unlike the Elite, these things were smaller and much more bestial. They resembled the quadrupedal monsters she’d seen corpses of piled up around the street, looking like flayed Tasmanian tigers with oily green flesh.

  Their appearance roused the nearby monsters, which had been angrily loitering behind the barricade, pacing up and down its length in search of any weaknesses or soldiers they could pick off without suffering the same in return. They didn’t screech or howl. Evergreen monsters did none of that; they merely reoriented and switched gears. In moments, the thirty-strong pack grew to thrice its size, new monsters streaming out of nearby buildings as if summoned by some inaudible call.

  Mia wasn’t worried, watching them impassively as they approached while preparing her Arcane Shield and Spectral Blade spells. With both summoned, she almost looked like a magical swordsman, if you ignored the oversized, wide-brimmed witch hat sitting snugly on her head and the wand hanging from her hips. Unfortunately, she would never be a viable strength-based fighter, as her Base Strength maxed out at a measly 5. Not that she wanted to. The wizard and battle mage fighting styles suited her much better, both in terms of her capabilities and mentality. She preferred there to be some space between her and things trying to chew her face off, and the versatility of the Mage Class was nearly unmatched, according to the System books she’s read.

  With all the loyalist teams from the raid and a few of the unionists joining her, and with the help of the army detachment and their enchanted, automatic weaponry, Mia didn’t see any way the monsters could avoid their fate of being turned into compost.

  Mia stood behind a tall but narrow slit in the barricade, set up like an arrow slit found on the palisades of castle walls. Spectral Blade in hand, she lined it up with the vertical slit and then sent it lunging forward. With a twist of her wrist, the spell-construct turned mid-air, going from vertical to horizontal before it started spinning, and then the massive magical saw-blade spun forth parallel to the ground.

  Arcane Blasts would have had a larger range, but for chaff with no survival instincts, Spectral Blade was the easy winner. She just had to make sure the blade didn’t strike the asphalt and unduly compromise the arcane construct’s structural integrity.

  It met the first monster, one of the peak Rank 0 ones, a moment later, and the murderous plant showed no sign of having acknowledged the blade’s existence. If plant monsters were capable of regret, Mia wondered whether that was the last thing running through its mind before the spinning blade cut the top half of its head off.

  Mia shifted her hand, slowly moving it horizontally, and, as if the axis the blade spun around was affixed to a long, invisible pole extending from her forearm, the spell construct mirrored the motion. It moved in a wide arc, cutting through the monsters it came across. One lost its head entirely, another tried to jump but got cut in half, and a few lost their hind or front legs.

  The soldiers opened fire through similar arrow slits across the barricade around the same time Mia’s blade killed the first monster, and the sound of dozens of guns firing at once was almost deafening. At least they were shooting in semi-auto or in short bursts, not just letting it rip on full auto.

  Mia watched as one monster got hit right between its eyes, its head snapping back from the force of it as the back of its skull exploded out in a shower of gore and curdling flames. The corpse struck the asphalt, but its momentum carried it forward, all the while the magical fire burned and spread from its mangled head. She’d been worried the slick, oily skin of the monsters made them more resistant to fire, but apparently that wasn’t the case, or magical fire just didn’t care even if they were resistant.

  The hail of bullets struck them with precision, though most soldiers aimed for the centre of mass instead of the head, and so the damage didn’t prove instantly fatal. It did make sure, however, that the first dozen monsters to actually reach the walls would be properly covered in flames.

  Mia felt the other mages unleash their Skills, a wide array of elemental powers slamming into the monsters and dropping just as many of the monsters as the soldiers.

  “BACK!” Brent bellowed out, and all the previous raiders obeyed on instinct. With a flick of her wrist, Mia sent the Spectral Blade spinning back towards herself on a return arc, cutting its way through four monsters on the way and then through the barricade to slam into her palm.

  She jumped back, Shield coming up just in case, as the melee fighters stepped forward to place themselves between the squishier mages and the monsters. At a guess, no more than twenty of the monsters made it all the way to the barricade, the rest lying dead or dying scattered across the street beyond it.

  Two more joined them as Brent and Mark brought their respective weapons to bear against the first ones to scramble over the barricade. A heavy upward swing of Mark’s mace sent his target flying back over the wall, while Brent decapitated his monster with a contemptuous swing of his longsword.

  The others along the barricade didn’t have any trouble either in dispatching the rest of the remaining monsters. The soldiers even got five of them without outside assistance when they switched their rifles into the much more wasteful full auto mode and absolutely demolished the five monsters with a hail of exploding bullets. Whoever was enchanting those things was pulling their weight a hundred times over, because it probably helped hundreds of soldiers who otherwise wouldn’t have had much hope at turning their experience into a legitimate ability to combat monsters, fight effectively.

  “All dead,” Mia said, satisfaction ringing clear in her voice. Feeling the repulsive balls of miasma — that had been the monsters — dissipate, and the ambient mana within her range slowly begin its return to normal, always pleased her inordinately.

  Brent nodded, but the soldiers hadn’t been with her on the raid, so they didn’t take her word for it. That meant the next two minutes were spent double-tapping every monster corpse to make sure there was not a single shred of doubt whether they were dead or not.

  The radio operator called back to the command centre, reporting success, and received the go-ahead to continue with plans unchanged. A wide section of the barricade was swept aside by the strongest members of the group, then they began the slow advance down the street, with the convoy of armour jeeps rumbling behind them.

  Mia kept her ears peeled for anything suspicious, and her mom had her own Sprite scout the surrounding area for ambushes while Sparkle recharged. Tension lingered in Mia’s shoulders, and she remained alert, treating every sound with extreme suspicion. This first strike had been easy, perhaps too easy. Maybe it was just paranoia, but she was determined not to let her guard down. After all, for the first time in her life, she was heading into combat not against monsters, but against people.

  Smart as some monsters could be, Mia had her paranoia cranked up to eleven for this eventual confrontation. People were, in some ways, much more dangerous than monsters.